Webinar reminder: Well Managed BI Today at 2pm ET

There's still time to register for today's Well Managed BI webinar. APOS COO Allan Pym shows you how  SAP BusinessObjects platform management and administration best practices can liberate your resources for more proactive activities and increase BI ROI.

Visual Discovery Infographic

There's a great infographic, sponsored by SAP, produced by the Aberdeen Group, and incorporated in Pierre Leroux's SAP blog entry, Is Visual Discovery for You and Your Organization?. Leroux's claim is that:

Best-in-class companies are already adopting visual discovery solutions over traditional business intelligence (BI), resulting in more agility for their organizations in the face of decreasing business response time.

The infographic tells us that, in visual discovery (or interactive BI): "Business users receive a rich, highly interactive interface, allowing them to manipulate and explore information directly."

The hope is that, in the age of the social Web, with its multi-voiced conversations between companies and customers, BI itself is becoming more conversational, better meeting the needs of information consumers through interactive, visual discovery. SAP's Visual Intelligence (or Visi), working with HANA, and providing drag-and-drop document creation, is a step toward realizing that concept.

ASUG BOUC 2012 - Thanks!

Judging by the talk around the water cooler, this year's ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference was a golden opportunity for APOS representatives to catch up with old friends and make many new ones. Thanks to all of you who made our time at ASUG BOUC 2012 valuable, interesting, and fun.

Our team delivered two presentations at this year's conference: one on geospatial BI; the other on BI 4.0 migration. If you would like more information on either of these topics, visit:

• APOS White Papers - Location Intelligence: Whole-Brain Analytics
• APOS Recorded Webinars - Well Managed BI Migration

ASUG BusinessObjects User Conference 2012

We'll have a substantial presence at this year's ASUG BusinessObjects User Conference in Orlando, September 10 - 13. If you are attending, drop by and see us at Booth 100.

And don't miss our two presentations:

• Well Managed Migration: Learn techniques, strategies and tips for successful migration to the SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 platform. APOS consultants will share insights from our 15+ years of migration consulting and BI solution development, and Mark Richardson of Rose-Richardson Enterprises will share his customer perspective on migration and the relevance of APOS Solutions.
   
• Geospatial BI 101 - a Primer for Mapping Your Route to a Successful Location Intelligence Deployment: Understand the technology and business potential of location intelligence, and what you have to do to make geospatial BI happen in your organization. Learn how to leverage geospatial technology and techniques to unlock new analysis and insight options with SAP BusinessObjects. Chris Hickman of Decision First Technologies joins APOS to present a series of use-case examples that will help participants understand the business value of deploying geospatial BI.

Need BI 4.0 WebIs from .NET Apps?

If you're investigating migration to BI 4.0, you probably already know that BI 4.0 doesn't include a plug-in to let you schedule Web Intelligence reports from .NET applications. If that's all that was keeping you from migrating, then we have good news: the APOS WebI .NET plug-in lets you schedule WebIs and manage defaults from .NET applications.
We created this plug-in to allow our own well managed BI solutions to work with BI 4.0, and now we're offering to the SAP BusinessObjects developer community. The APOS WebI .NET plug-in lets the developer handle format, prompt information, and other flags while scheduling Web Intelligence reports from .NET apps or saving report defaults.

Another issue that our plug-in solves is prompt reconstruction. When you create a new Web Intelligence report, or update an existing one, the prompt information on the report object becomes unavailable to the developer through the SDK. The APOS WebI .NET plug-in uses prompt reconstruction functionality to let the developer access the prompt information. You can schedule the report with the reconstructed prompts or save the report object for later use. You do not have to update the source report in order to schedule an instance.

You will notice that we are not using the GetPluginInterface method to initialize our plug-in. On a Web Intelligence object that method simply fails regardless of what you try to do with the returned object. We actually support using the plug-in interface to initialize our plug-in but this will not work with a Web Intelligence object. We tested it with other InfoObjects with no issues.

Example:

Using sm As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.SessionMgr = New CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.SessionMgr

    Using es As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.EnterpriseSession = sm.Logon("My Account", "My Password", "My CMS", "secEnterprise")

        Using iStore As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.InfoStore = es.GetService("InfoStore")

            Using objs As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.InfoObjects = iStore.Query("SELECT TOP 1 * FROM CI_INFOOBJECTS WHERE SI_NAME = 'My Report'")

                Using obj As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.InfoObject = objs(1)

                    Using plg As APOSWebiPlugIn.webi = New APOSWebiPlugIn.webi(obj)

                        plg.WebiAPOSLicenseKey = "<your key here>"

                        'Choose to schedule to XLS format

                        plg.WebiFormat = APOSWebiPlugIn.CeWebiFormat.ceWebiFormatExcel

                        'Get the list of prompt names

                        Dim prompts As List(Of String) = plg.WebiGetPromptList()

                        'GEt the lsit of values for the first prompt

                        Dim vals As List(Of APOSWebiPlugIn.WebiPromptValue) = plg.WebiGetPromptValues(prompts(0))

                        'Clear the list of values

                        vals.Clear()

                        'Add Texas as the only value for the prompt

                        vals.Add(New APOSWebiPlugIn.WebiPromptValue("Texas"))

                        'Save the list of values back to the report

                        plg.WebiSetPromptValues(prompts(0), vals)

                        'Schedule the report

                        iStore.Schedule(objs)

                    End Using

                End Using

            End Using

        End Using

    es.Logoff()

    End Using

End Using

You are welcome to try it and let me know what you think. Just email webiplugin@apos.com to ask for the library or send in any comments.

The Big Data Challenge

 

Why are companies such as HP, IBM and Oracle spending big money to acquire big data capabilities? Michael Vizard's Slashdot article, "The Multi-Billion-Dollar Data Management Challenge,"shows how serious the quest for Big Data supremacy has become. (Thanks to Jim Harris (@ocdqblog) for passing this along via Twitter.)

As of 2012, the world creates approximately 2.5 quintillion (2.5 x 10¹⁸) bytes of data daily (Wikipedia). The mathematical notation in parentheses is not not redundant, because the definition of "quintillion" varies according to which side of the Atlantic you are standing on. In the US and Canada, a quintillion has 18 zeroes; in the UK, France and Germany, a quintillion has 30 zeroes. That's just a simple example of the difficulty involved in dealing with Big Data.

Volume, variety, velocity and veracity are the four "Vs" of Big Data, but there's one "M" we should mention as well: metadata. Metadata is the key to managing and indexing the massive inflow of data, making accurate operational and competitive intelligence available in a timely manner to your decision makers.

For SAP BusinessObjects platform managers, now is the time to get your own metadata house in order. APOS Insight's enhanced audit and metadata management capabilities can help.

RIP Stephen R. Covey

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey told us to begin with the end in mind ("Habit 2"). The end of his life today reminds us of the formative effect he had on so many of us.

In "Habit 2", he told us to use our whole brain, and especially to find ways to tap into our right brain -- the hemisphere of passionate creativity and visualization.
Location intelligence may not have been what he had in mind as he was writing in 1989, but I'd like to think his whole-brain call to arms was prescient with regard to today's geospatial visualization trend.

Stephen R. Covey dead as a result of a bicycling accident.